The Descending Order Trick

A proprietary blend is a panel line that names several ingredients and prints one total for all of them. It is legal and common, and a seller using one is not breaking a rule. FDA’s labeling guide sets out what a blend must print: “On the same line, you must list the total weight of all ‘other dietary ingredients’ contained in the blend.” Individual weights are not required.

Then comes the sentence this whole post rests on, and it is easy to read past: “Indented underneath the name of the blend, you must list the ‘other dietary ingredients’ in the blend, either in a column or linear fashion, in descending order of predominance by weight.”

In descending order of predominance by weight. The list is not alphabetical, not a design decision, not the order somebody thought sounded best. It is a ranking. A blend that keeps every amount private has still published the relative order of its contents — and the moment one amount appears anywhere inside that list, the ranking converts into arithmetic. One printed figure bounds every other row: a ceiling for everything below it, a floor for everything above. Most blends never give you one; where one does, it is usually because a single ingredient had to be itemised for another reason.

This jar is a clean demonstration, because it supplies all three things the method needs: a blend total of 82 mg, a full list of nine members in printed order, and exactly one itemised amount — caffeine, fifth, at 5 mg.

Read the table as a shape rather than a list of figures. At the top sits one row that could be substantial, bounded between about 14 mg and 62 mg. In the middle, three rows with a floor and no useful ceiling. At the bottom, four named ingredients — including the two doing the most marketing work on the front of a jar sold for male enhancement — which cannot exceed 5 mg each, so no more than 20 mg between them. The four rows above the caffeine hold at least 20 mg and at most 77 mg, since 82 less the printed 5 is all there is to share. None of that shape is printed anywhere. It came from one figure and one sentence of federal guidance.

The method is the thing to take away, so here is where to practise it. The home page carries an interactive splitter for this blend: move the split and watch the ordering rule refuse to let the bottom four rows rise above 5 mg, however generously you treat the top of the list. It is the quickest way to see that the shape above is forced rather than chosen. The longer written guide is how to read a proprietary blend, which covers the cases this post skips: blends with no itemised member at all, and panels where a vitamin outside the blend is mistaken for one inside it. The panel itself is transcribed line by line with its three footnotes on the supplement facts page, and the bounds are applied one row at a time on the ingredients page.

Two notes for anyone running this on a shelf. If a blend has no itemised member you are not stuck: the ranking alone still tells you whether the ingredient the marketing leans on hardest is near the bottom of the list. And if a desk answers the telephone, the question worth asking is how many milligrams of each ingredient are in the blend. It is a one-line answer for anyone holding the specification, and the shape of the reply is informative either way. The sales line supplied for this product is +1 (302) 200-3480.